No Man’s Sky Devs say its ‘NEXT’ Update will be the Largest So Far

No Man’s Sky update arrives in the Summer

After four years of hype, setbacks, and promises, No Man’s Sky finally arrived in 2016 to waves of disappointment and criticism. But developer Hello Games never abandoned its ambitious open-world space sim and has been improving some of its flaws with updates, the largest of which will arrive this summer.

Such was the anticipation over No Man’s Sky and the game’s procedurally generated 18 quintillion planets, both Hello Games and Kotaku journalist Jason Schreier received death threats when it was delayed for an extra 49 days. But the finished game was far from what most people were expecting, failing to live up to its pre-release footage and lacking a multiplayer option.

NMS’s concurrent player count on Steam quickly fell to below 1000 people following its launch, and the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received 23 complaints that the “game content was not as depicted or described.” There were also numerous reports of people receiving refunds.

But the Foundation, Pathfinder, and Atlas Rises updates have improved No Man’s Sky, adding elements such as base building, farming, land vehicles, and basic multiplayer. Hello Games’ co-founder, Sean Murray, says the summer update, called No Man’s Sky NEXT, will be its biggest ever.

“We called this update NEXT, because it’s an important next step on a longer journey for us and the community,” said Murray. “We’ve been working our socks off on this and it’s by far our biggest update so far. It will be free to existing players, and we’ll continue to support No Man’s Sky in this way for the foreseeable future.”

We don’t know what we’ll see in Next, but some suspect an expansion of the currently limited multiplayer. One thing we do know is that No Man’s Sky, which has been a PlayStation 4 console exclusive since launch, is coming to the Xbox One, with enhanced 4K and HDR support for the Xbox One X version. It’s also set to arrive on Tencent’s WeGame. “As of Atlas Rises, China is our second biggest region for players of No Man’s Sky, so we’re excited to be able to support that further,” Murray said.

Coming in Summer 2018 is No Man’s Sky NEXT, a free update for PS4, PC, Xbox and WeGame. It’s our largest update so far, and we’re working our socks off pic.twitter.com/wZhjaLMbsT